(Photograph courtesy of Reblitz-Bowers Encyclopedia.)

National Electric Piano Company Peerless Orchestrion Model DeLuxe. Instrumentation for certain (as confirmed by examining the above illustration) included a full 88-note piano (played by 66 notes in the roll plus bass and treble octave-couplers) and a “Solo Mandolin” attachment. A bass drum is obviously present, and so there was probably a cymbal and snare drum, but whether there might have been a tympani effect, triangle, or castanets cannot be determined from the photograph. For pipework, there appears to be only one rank of pipes, consisting of 36 wooden flute pipes, chromatically arranged. Was there an option to have violin pipes instead of flute, or have maybe two ranks of pipes, one of violin and the other flute? As of this writing the precise catalogue specifications for the National Model DeLuxe remain unknown.

Below the pipework is the rewind roll mechanism, mounted above the pneumatic stack, which is, in turn, sitting on and supported by the keybed. looking lower, into the bottom area of the piano, at center is the electric motor, and at far right is the rotary type pump, in this case providing both vacuum for the player mechanisms and wind-pressure to sound the pipework. Attached to the left side of the rotary pump is the vacuum reservoir, and at far left and attached to the underside of the keybed is the wind-pressure reservoir. Notice the compactness and relative simplicity of the feeder pump and other related components compared to those much more cumbersome implementations used a decade earlier.